


Dame Fortune Smiled

by Aris Merquoni (ArisTGD)



Series: Clean Steam and Sky [2]
Category: Pirates of the Caribbean (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M, Steampunk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-07
Updated: 2010-03-07
Packaged: 2017-10-07 18:58:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/68177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArisTGD/pseuds/Aris%20Merquoni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steampunk AU. Monte Carlo is a good place to lose your money and lose yourself inside your head. James is trying to do both; Jack Sparrow appears to not want him to do either.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dame Fortune Smiled

Hazard pay accumulated at a ferocious rate for airmen, so when he was discharged from hospital James had nothing to do and a small fortune to do it with. Fortunately, the service and the Empire had a long tradition of what to do with men it had burned out and paid off with a few thousand pounds sterling: in a few hours, he was aboard an aeroloft to Monte Carlo, staring out the window on the main deck and wondering if his lack of reaction to being in flight was an artifact of his recovery or the champagne served on board. Possibly it was both.

The city was beautiful, a confection of light and color; he felt completely removed from it as he drifted away from La Condamine and into a hotel in the care of patient, nearly invisible porters who happily took tips in English currency. He got his bills changed at the hotel (for a small fee) and had his clothing pressed (for a small fee) and had dinner sent to his room (for a small fee) and wondered what the hell he was doing here.

It was the Thing to Do, of course--one retired, one went to Monte Carlo to relax for a while, enjoy perhaps a week of freedom before returning to be shuffled back into London society. It was expected; it was nearly required. London society had a list of experiences that one was to be familiar with and an airman had limited opportunities to build up his catalogue, and so--here he was. Saving his career--_a_ career--meant making certain sacrifices. Meant being polite to Governor Swann's friends in London and not biting his tongue when they suggested that working on an airship must be as good as captaining one.

Monaco didn't have a national library worth mentioning and his French was regrettable anyway, so gambling it was.

A woman wearing the costume of the house--such as it was--handed him a glass of champagne as soon as he reached the floor. He spent a moment blinking in the dazzle of lights before he decided to drink it. The gambling floor folded away from the stairs into recesses like petals, each holding another table surrounded by hopefuls. Men--and a few women--reached Monte Carlo from all over, and the casinos had taken advantage of the variety in patrons to fleece all of them at games they were unfamiliar with. James recognized the dice at the nearest table, and baccarat, and the roulette wheel; by advantage of one particular cease-fire conference he could identify the pai gow tiles being shuffled a few tables away. But much of the noise and the motion was completely alien and he drifted through the tables feeling rather like a ghost.

"Another lost countryman?" asked an English voice somewhere behind his left ear.

James turned, startled, and only just managed to hold onto his glass. He was being smiled at by a pair of sideburns attached to a tall man in a good suit. James cleared his throat. "Beg pardon?"

"You can recognize the look a mile off," the man said. "You were either in an armoured carapace in Morocco or a steel ship in Singapore, I'd wager."

"Airship," James corrected him. "Off Jamaica. And you are...?"

"Gilbert. Sad lot, I suppose. Avoid the roulette wheel tonight." Gilbert patted him on the shoulder--giving James just enough time to recognize the expatriate playwright's name--and moved off into the throng in the direction of one of the card tables.

James shook his head, handed his champagne to a waitress, and took Gilbert's spot at the roulette table.

The croupier was switching out as he sat down. The new man's name was Emil; he had dark hair and wide eyes, and did not bother smiling. James watched for a round and then bet jeu zero with four hundred.

"German bet, monsieur. La partie continue, mesdames, messieurs; faites vos jeux." James tried to watch the wheel spin, but the reflections from the lights overhead were dazzling. "La partie continue."

James opened his eyes when he heard the croupier spin the ball into the wheel. "Rien ne va plus," the croupier called, as the tiny white sphere spun around and around and finally clattered into its slot. Thirty-three. Blacks and odds and nowhere near the bet James had placed.

Well, it was only money. "Again," he said, when the croupier started up the next round.

The bet would pay out on zero, three, twelve, fifteen, thirty-two, thirty-five, and twenty-six. The next time Emil called "Les jeux sont faits" the ball landed on twenty.

"Again, please," he said stubbornly on the next spin. Emil nodded politely and took his money.

"Faites vos jeux," Emil called. James set down another stack of chips. Someone was at his elbow attempting to hand him a glass of champagne and he waved them away.

"Have you tried twenty-two yet?" the champagne-bearer asked.

He knew that voice.

He turned around. Jack Sparrow was standing at his elbow, almost unrecognizably groomed and smiling dangerously.

The sum total of what he knew--what anyone really knew, in the service, about Jack Sparrow, was this: he owned a ship, by what providence nobody could say. He occasionally sold legal goods. More often, he bought and sold things that one couldn't quite say were illegally obtained. He was the luckiest bastard in the Caribbean and not one government had been able to charge him with anything. Norrington had come close. Twice.

Ivory clattered against wood. "Trente et un, mesdames et messieurs; noir, étrange."

"What are you doing here?" James asked.

"Having more fun than you are," Sparrow said. "Tried twenty-two?"

"Straight bets are a fool's game," James said, and turned back to the board.

Sparrow leaned over his shoulder again. His breath was hot on James' ear as he whispered, "What are you doing here, then?"

The croupier gave the wheel a couple of spins to get it rolling, then raised his eyes in James' direction. "Monsieur?"

James looked down at his dwindling stack of chips, then picked them up and dropped them square on 22.

"La partie continue," Emil called, and James shut his eyes again. He could hear Sparrow taking the seat beside him, and vaguely wondered if he had enough money remaining in his luggage to pay the rest of his hotel stay, or if he should just advance his return ticket and go straight back to London.

When he opened his eyes, the ball was nestled in box twenty-two.

Chips were being pushed across the table toward him. Within moments, he was looking at more money than he'd ever seen in his life. Sparrow raised his champagne in a toast, and giddily he wished he had his own glass to share. It occurred to him that all he had to do was ask.

"Why don't you let it ride?" Sparrow said, and took a drink.

For a moment James couldn't believe what he was hearing. "What?"

"Let it ride," Sparrow repeated, gesturing at the table.

The giddy feeling wasn't going away, like he was diving too fast through cloud cover. "You're insane."

"Yes?" Sparrow said.

There wasn't a good answer for that--except to gather his chips up and put them right back where they had come from. There were a few muffled exclamations from around the table, but James never looked away from Sparrow.

"Vingt-deux!" the croupier exclaimed again, and now there was more murmuring, and someone sent to fetch the mechanic to check the balance of the wheel. Emil counted out the chips and pushed them across the table toward James.

He looked into Jack's eyes. Jack grinned back at him.

"Let it ride," James said.

The mechanic arrived, checked the balance and the spin, and nodded at the croupier. Emil totaled the bets with his eyes and spun the wheel.

When the ball hit twenty-two again everything but Jack Sparrow's grin seemed to explode in noise and light.

* * *

By the time they made it back to James' hotel room, they had decided that Jack was going to come back to his hotel room with him, and consumed most of a bottle of absinthe between them. The bottle hit the floor and rolled under the bed, but James was a little too distracted with Jack's hands in his waistband to care.

"One second," he said, reaching for the lightswitch, but Jack tugged on him hard enough to overbalance him and they both wound up on the floor.

James let the carpet tickle his nose for a moment, then rolled over and said groggily, "I don't believe I'm coordinated."

"Drunk?" Jack asked.

"That, yes," James admitted.

"Good," Jack said, crawling over his person until they were aligned, nose-to-nose. "Then I can take drunken advantage of you."

"Yes," James said, then tangled his fingers in Jack's hair and kissed him, hard. Jack tasted like absinthe, straight, and his fingers were busy with the buttons on James' trousers, which was remarkably dexterous of him. James attempted to help, but mostly his fingers kept sliding off the buttons--and whoever decided that trousers had to have so many damned buttons in the first place?

Jack got James' trousers open and started maddeningly working his way up James' shirt, parting the fabric and stopping every so often to run his clever fingers along James' skin. He finally flicked open the last button at James' collar and leaned down to lap at the sensitive line of James' throat, like a cat, and James closed his eyes and moaned, pushing his hips upward and rubbing against the delicious pressure of Jack's body.

It was just about perfect until Jack pulled his head back and looked down at his fingers. "What's this, then?" he asked.

James blinked, tried to tilt his head up and narrowly avoided knocking his head against Jack's. And then he dropped his head back to the carpet and devoutly wished he'd never even heard of Monte Carlo, roulette, or Jack fucking Sparrow.

"Ah," Sparrow said after a moment. Of course he recognized the revivification scar. Jack Sparrow knew everything, didn't he? Even possibly how to undetectably bias a roulette wheel for his own purposes, which seemed to be to get James back to his room and... and James wasn't sure what, but it involved making him miserable, that was certain. And--

Jack licked straight across the circular scar's diameter, then around its circumference twice, before leaning forward again and looking straight into James' eyes. "Had a run of bad luck, there, haven't you?"

James nodded.

"Seems to me that's the kind of luck makes a man feel alone in the world," Jack said.

James nodded again.

"And it seems to me that's one thing you bloody angels know how to do right," Jack continued, sliding his hand back down James' chest and stomach, one finger catching momently on his navel, "is feel not alone."

James took a deep breath, and felt the room spinning with absinthe and the heat of Jack's skin against his, and this was insane, this was--

"Please," he groaned.

Jack grinned. "Thought you'd never ask."

He couldn't quite work out how Jack got him out of his trousers so quickly. "The bed is," he started to say, trying to be helpful, and "Screw the bloody bed," Jack parried, and got his hand and then his mouth around James' prick, and oh, God, he'd had far too much of that absinthe, he was holding onto the floor by his fingertips, but it felt so wonderful he just didn't want to let go of anything.

Jack didn't give up until James was incoherent. He whimpered as Jack climbed back on top of him, warm and solid.

"I knew I should have cut you off earlier," Jack said.

"Mmmn," James said. He suddenly remembered he had hands, and arms, and grabbed Jack and rolled them both over so he was mostly on top. "Stop moving."

"Fine, mate," Jack said, letting his hands flop to the floor beside his head. "You're going to have such a headache tomorrow, you know that."

"Shut up," James ordered. He took a deep breath, then said, "Here's what I want you to do. First, get me to that bed."

Jack pursed his lips. "I'm going to need to move in order to do that."

"Quiet. Then I want you to fuck me."

Jack grinned. "Gonna need to move to do that as well."

"Fine." James struggled to his knees. "That's the plan then."

They almost didn't make it, but eventually James found himself on his bed, missing his boots and the rest of his clothing. Jack was leaning over him, naked, soft light through the curtains resting silver and ivory over the muscles of his shoulders. And then Jack was pushing a finger--two!--inside him, and God but he was desperate for this.

"Yeah?" Jack asked.

"Yes," James panted, "_Yes_, Jack, _please_."

"Right, don't have to ask twice," Jack said. He leaned forward and pushed James' legs onto his shoulders. And then with one easy thrust--God! oh God, James was moaning, begging, grabbing onto Jack's arms like it would keep him from falling. He hadn't done this--hadn't felt able to ask for this for so long, but right now he just needed, needed badly enough that he was aching with it through and through. And Jack was here, and Jack was _completely unsafe_, and this was entirely too foolish, but he was here and he was--he was--oh, God--

Time seemed to extinguish itself in a blur. The next thing he was aware of was Jack's heavy warmth curled against him, the blanket being tucked around his chest.

"Mmm?" he asked.

"Get some sleep," Jack said. And then all was dark.

* * *

When he awoke the next day, his head was ready to split open and Jack was gone.

There was a jug of water on his bedside table, next to a pile of paper. It took James a couple glasses of water to realize that the pile represented precisely half of the most money he'd ever seen in one place at one time. He stared at it, and despite the pounding in his head he had to smile.

He lost most of it back over the next week, and when he got back to London he took the job.


End file.
